The Limoges town hall took more than a century to become a landmark. It was finished in 1883, survived two world wars, and was declared a French historical monument in 1975.

On October 17, masked rioters set it on fire. By morning, the spire had collapsed and France's top regional official said the building was "largely lost."

It was one of hundreds of buildings burned across France over a single weekend. Around 550,000 people poured into the streets. Stores were looted, cars were torched, and smoke drifted over Paris. Police made about 2,400 arrests.

Much of the coverage called it a protest over fuel prices and crowded schools. But the flags in the streets told a different story. Few were French. Many were Palestinian, many more were communist, and the rest belonged to radical left-wing groups. Of the 54 organizations tied to the unrest, only 16 were student or youth groups.

The man arrested for the Limoges fire is a far-left activist already on a government watchlist.

Americans have seen this movie before. In the summer of 2020, rioters set fire to St. John's Church across from the White House while TV reporters described the protests as peaceful. The cause on the signs was different, but the playbook was the same: radical activists, burning buildings, and a political class that explained it away.

What France has, and what America must never allow itself to become, is the fuel those activists feed on.

For decades, France let in mass migration from North Africa and the Middle East with little expectation that newcomers would become French. Today the country counts about 7.3 million immigrants, roughly one in every ten residents. Many live in suburban neighborhoods where the language, the loyalties, and often the law look little like the rest of France.

France has already paid for that, twice. In 2005, riots tore through those suburbs for three weeks, nearly 9,000 cars were burned, and the government declared a state of emergency. In 2023, after police shot a 17-year-old in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, France burned again. Thousands were arrested, government buildings were attacked across the country, and rioters rammed a burning car into a mayor's home while his wife and children were inside.

This weekend, France's radical left took to the streets carrying Palestinian flags. It's no coincidence that the cause of choice for France's far left is the cause of a large immigrant community the far left now courts for votes. Mass migration created a political bloc, and the radicals have learned how to mobilize it. French President Emmanuel Macron could only say there is "no place for violence in our republic." The violence came anyway.

Across Europe, voters have noticed. Parties promising to control migration are surging in the polls, and establishment politicians call it a threat to democracy. Voters who watch their cities burn and their landmarks go up in flames call it common sense.

Now look at the United States.

During the Biden administration, Border Patrol and customs officers recorded more than 10 million encounters with illegal immigrants. Nearly 2 million more were known "gotaways" who slipped past agents entirely. No one knows exactly who all of them are, where they went, or what they believe.

Democrats spent four years insisting none of that mattered. They called the border secure while millions crossed it. They called border enforcement cruel and fought deportations in court. Their party's activist wing is now openly calling to abolish ICE altogether.

President Trump closed the border, and crossings fell to record lows. But a border that one president closes can be thrown open by the next Congress. If Democrats win control in November, every tool Trump has used, from enforcement funding to deportations, becomes a target.

France didn't become France overnight. It took decades of open doors, politicians who refused to demand assimilation, and leaders who explained away each riot as something other than what it was. Every step was presented as compassion, and every warning was dismissed as bigotry.

The Limoges town hall survived the Kaiser and Hitler, but it didn't survive France's refusal to enforce its own borders and its own laws.

America still has the choice France stopped making decades ago. It's on the ballot in 13 days.